


Witnessed

by umbel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: "oops I tripped and did a psychological torture", Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Monster Jon - Freeform, a Tim was harmed in the making of this film, in which an eldritch horror is very committed to its Brand, non-consensual telepathy, non-consensual use of Beholding powers, post-119
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 11:52:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16095122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/umbel/pseuds/umbel
Summary: Tim's life was claimed by the Eye, and the Eye lays claim to his death as well. It's unfortunate that its Archivist is currently in no fit state to enforce that claim.Unfortunate, but not insurmountable.





	Witnessed

**Author's Note:**

> [Kyros](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/Kyros) is squarely to blame for this monstrous little plot bunny, and for a number of the ways that it developed from there. The bad times for Tim was all me, though, so... uh, oops. ~~I didn't mean to~~
> 
> Given we're talking about a horror show where people get et by worms and somebody stuck his arm through a meat grinder, I don't think this should rate as _too_ graphic? But I'm gonna err on the safe side with tags and ratings here, and here is a more specific **content warning:** contains blood, mentions of nausea/vomiting, injury-based body horror, and some description of gruesome injury before the body horror kicks in.

Afterward Jon drifts for a time, just below the surface of awareness. 

There is no _awake_ here, there is not quite _dreaming_ , just the endless eddies that ripple over him, tugging in more directions than he can name. He sinks down into the dark; he rises up into something else, slurred shapes and sounds that resolve and dissolve, becoming his hand but it is not his hand; his hand but it is a bowl; his hand that holds a toy that is then a tongue that is then a blade that vibrates on the edge of speech without once changing shape; the face whose name he does not know and the face he knows and both are the same face and neither is, and through the ringing in his teeth he hears two voices come out of its-their mouth...

He tries to rise higher than that, sometimes; rises for precious moments into a restless knowledge, a sense of Need and Called and Unfinished and Unwritten. He calls out (he is called) into that wide, wordless yearning, and in those moments he discovers many things: the distant green glow of a fire exit sign as it picks out the edges of a pile of rubble, the musty damp of this stale and abandoned place layered under fresher scents of smoke and burnt plastic, the sound of his own breath wheezing faint and shallow, the thick dust filling his lungs and coating his tongue and speckling his skin, the pieces of debris that slide across the curve of his cheek when he turns his head weakly to one side, the copper tang flooding his mouth as cold seeps into his fingertips. A quiet crackling static and the brush of his knuckles against cool plastic that whirs lightly in a way that's... comforting? And yet also something else entirely.

But sooner or later the trickles of sensation are overwhelmed by a growing, agonized tide that crashes into him. He is pain and pain and pain and _pain_ without edge or texture or end, and all else is ripped from his grasp as he goes spinning into the dark, into the light, into sound and back into silence.

He drifts; he doesn't quite wake and he doesn't quite dream, but with enough repetition he begins to build a sequence, coalescing into something like conclusion. The toy that is a tongue and a weapon (the detonator, yes) speaking a _click_ into white-knuckled hands (Tim, yes). A face of discolored flesh that cracks around something no longer a smile, peeling away from unbearable kaleidoscopes of color (Nikola, yes). Echoes of echoes of music that swell and then fade, swell—and then fade into the walls rushing in, carrying an almighty roar that yanks the roof down to meet it. _The explosion._ Yes. And now the pile of rubble (broken ceiling tiles, yes, shattered wood and glass from frames along the wax museum's walls, he thinks) shifts, almost imperceptibly, and yields a choked-off groan, the sound of breathing even more ragged than his own. That green light playing over the limp fingers of a familiar hand. _Tim is here._

And now there is also the slowing rhythm of that breathing, depth and speed now lost at each drift upward into the world again; the weak movements of that arm as it attempts to shift the rubble, fading closer and closer to stillness and completion. _Tim is dying._

And that, at last, is the conclusion that falls into the dark like a magnet dropped into iron filings, the scattered fragments of Jonathan Sims snapping together into consciousness and a feverish energy. 

His body jerks upward, only to be stopped abruptly at the discovery of a heavy surface pinning his chest to the ground; his hands scrabble for its edges (a door? yes) but only manage to raise the surface a few inches, barely enough for him to squeeze out from under it as more ceiling tiles slide to the ground around him. As Jon does so, a vague sense of wrongness in his stomach extends itself into deep lines of fire that rake across his skin in slow motion; he is nearly out before he manages to connect that feeling to the existence of a long board trapped under the door—the screws jutting out where it had been ripped from a joint.

That knowledge hits him all at once the moment he's free, and he has to stop and take great heaving breaths against the roiling nausea and the dark static closing in on his vision. One hand clutches his stomach and the spreading wetness beneath the ruins of his shirtfront; the other absentmindedly feels along the ground until he finds the tape recorder—which yes, is somehow still working, but the best response he can muster to that is a sense that he probably _should_ be surprised, or would have been surprised once, except he has seen so many things and is just so _tired_...

 _Tim is dying._ That knowledge hits him again, unbidden, and the static pulls back enough to let him focus on the body half-buried under ceiling tile with a stubborn facsimile of determination. Tim might be dying but he is not yet dead, dammit, and Jon will _not_ let him be lost to this—except that the moment he rolls over and hauls himself into a sitting position, another wave of dizziness and nausea rolls inexorably over him and it's all he can do to keep from folding again with a groan, his arms trembling just in the act of holding himself upright.

He needs to be there, but he is so weak. He needs to be there, so he can do... something. There's something he's supposed to do. He is so cold, _so_ tired, and all he needs to do is drag himself a few meters forward except all he seems able to do is watch the life fade from Tim's body—no longer wholly sure whether the faint erratic breaths are real or conjured up by his own denial—clutch at that damn tape recorder, and catalogue his own injuries while he waits for the pain to blur into one incomprehensible tide again. 

(There's the stiff, sharp ache in his back and shoulder, he notes, where they had been twisted underneath the door; a sickening burn and spreading trickles of wetness from the gouges across his stomach; a tight, bruised mass lower down that probably heralds a ruptured kidney or some other inconvenient emergency; a constellation of shallow glass-studded cuts across his left arm and side, winking in and out of perception as he moves; the headache that sits heavy behind his forehead and makes it even harder to think...)

He needs to be there, is all he knows. He _needs_ to be there. He needs to _see_ , he thinks—which is when an electric flutter in his stomach overtakes the nausea and expands out to ripple across his skin, his entire body spasming so badly he barely manages to catch himself with a stuttered gasp. Jon clutches his stomach by reflex, about to gag, and then jerks his hand back as he realizes the skin under his fingers is literally rippling, instead drops the recorder to peel up his shirt: the steady flow of blood is darkening, slowing, even as the wounds themselves seem to open up wider, with swollen masses bulging up out of the gaps in his flesh. He can feel the same ripples up and down the cuts in his arm, all of it a sensation so wholly foreign that for a moment it nearly overwhelms every other sense: sight going dark, sound fading, pain and cold and all sense of shape or equilibrium lost. 

His eyes _open_. All of them.

And in the distant greenish light—now suddenly so bright that to look directly at the exit sign sends pain lancing through his forehead—Jon sees dozens of those eyes bulging out of his skin, the flow of uncanny, almost iridescent blood slowing almost to nothing at their edges. He can feel them twitch and roll within him, dark and unblinking, and he can see, impossibly, from each small pupil, fragmented vision rolling wildly around the room as he attempts to focus. His mouth floods with a taste like a darkly floral oil slick, his eyes—his own eyes—watering, and the hand that goes to wipe at his face comes away wet with that same black liquid. It stains his fingers in a way that blood really shouldn't.

That fluttering, bubbling feeling has dispersed into a weird and wild energy, sending sparks up every nerve ending so that each movement is a wealth of sensory data. The pain is still there among all of it, but disconnected somehow; as he staggers to his feet and across the room to drop down next to Tim, he merely catalogues each flare and moves on to note the texture of the debris under his knees, the stronger reek of burning in this part of the room, the weak flickering behind Tim's eyelids. When Jon reaches out to brush the sticky, clotting hair back from Tim's forehead, he can feel each individual strand; he can reconstruct every groove in each of his own fingertips from the way they slide across Tim's flushed and bruised face. He's panting with the effort to contain so much sheer _data_ —the sound of his own breathing so loud it almost hurts, his only balm the insistent, steady whir of the recorder in his white-knuckled grip—but he can't let any of it slip away. Whatever this surge of power is, it's not good for much _useful_ , Jon thinks bitterly, not for actually _saving_ Tim; in the end all he can still do is witness, but if that's so then he means to have _all_ of it. He means to have every last detail of these last moments, greedily clutch this fragment of Tim-that-is and hold it safe within himself against the inexorable future of Tim-that-was. It's not what Tim deserved, it's not what Jon owes him, but it's all Jon has left to give.

It's not enough, though. The eyes are rolling dizzyingly, restlessly, and his skin is crawling with sensation, and it's still not enough, and he's running out of time. 

His fingers dig into the curve of Tim's face, and before he's really even registered what he's doing, something inside him reaches out and _pulls_. 

(Distantly, he feels his eyes—all of his eyes—swivel inward to focus on the task at hand.)

Memories unspool into him: at first in a rush of free association, chaotic leaps of another person's intuition, then ordering themselves into something resembling neat linearity as he digs deeper, searching, learning, witnessing. It's too much (it's still not enough); he needs all of it (he doesn't want it); he finds impressions of a happy childhood (mostly), contented (mostly) in the shadow of the brother Tim idolized, discards them restlessly, flicking forward with a growing impatient hunger as each one fails to satisfy. He finds that cold, dark afternoon in the theater of stone, and pauses for just a moment to check it against the existing record out of a sense of Archival duty, absorb a few interesting details that Tim omitted from his statement (moving on only because he's running out of time, he tells himself, and not because even the depth of Tim's revulsion at the twisted form of Grimaldi tastes like nothing so much as bored deja vu).

Then there are the weeks and months and years after Danny's death, and oh, _this_ : the secret rage against his cheerful, careless brother; the shame for secretly resenting the dead; the shame transmuted into rage at himself for not knowing somehow, not stopping him somehow. Prentiss and her writhing hive, as Jon's own skin lights up in sympathetic agony (but it's distant, and in the rush of sensation the pain borders on sweet novelty). The months after Prentiss, the tiptoeing round poor hapless _Jon_ , who wears his scars so poorly, and his suspicion even worse. The day when even Martin, in the throes of his ridiculous puppy crush, stops pretending to care that Jon wasn't the only one who had nearly died that day, wasn't the only one who still woke up with crawling in his skin. The casual lunches with the thing that wore the name of someone Tim had cared for (didn't wear her face and he never even noticed), and the moments when he looked at her and remembered the feel of her skin beneath his hands, her lips buried in the crook of his neck ( _such_ a tangled wreck of associations here, too, inextricable from that shattering moment of realization). His own growing, grieving paranoia, carefully hidden from the others as Jon never bothered to do (and then not so carefully, as it emerged that nobody much cared so long as the boss wasn't the one acting out)...

Every hidden shameful fantasy, every heartbreak, every indignity, every dark and despairing and bitter moment, and under it he's vaguely aware of Tim's conscious mind, aware now and weakly _writhing_ as they both relive each excruciating (delicious) detail, and that's data too, and he will have it all.

He breaks, at last, against the edge of the present, and slides back into reality with a long sigh. Tim is trembling now beneath his hand, his eyes open and glassy, and Jon holds him in his gaze, all of his eyes unblinking; he can taste the echoes still reverberating in Tim's mind, flavoring his thoughts with so many complex and unpredictable things. He has known, he has been sated, and now all that is left is to be a witness to these last precious minutes: to record the last of Tim before he fades into the End, into the nothing beyond. It's still less than Tim deserves but it's all that he can do, he thinks again, licking his lips absently.

But in this, he finds himself stopped in his tracks by a sudden, stubborn hatred that swells up to devour both remembered fear and present pain. A few of his eyes look down to see Tim's hand digging into his wrist with unexpected strength.

 _ **No**_ , is what he hears as clearly as if Tim had spoken it aloud. For a moment Tim's eyes are almost clear, and meet his with unflinching fury.

_**This** bit is mine. You don't get to have it._

Which is when Jon realizes what exactly he's been doing (wakes up, he'd like to say, but that would imply that what he's done wasn't real or that he wasn't really the one who did it, and he can still feel that itching hunger: the siren call of the Eye, and the harmonies woven into it that are all too much his own). _These things aren't human_ , comes a voice from newly filed memory, unbidden. _It's instinct. You can't **not**. ___

____

"O-oh god, Tim," he stammers out, breaking eye contact as his thoughts and gaze scatter in all directions (Tim's grip is already loosening before he even moves; there's not much time left). "Tim, I'm so—" and the nausea is back now as he turns to retch more black fluid onto the ground, those floral hints fading under something darker and more acrid.

____

Jon fumbles at the tape recorder without looking at it or back at Tim, popping the shell open to reveal the tape, which he hurls at the opposite wall before he has a chance to think better of it. He's jerking to his feet before the tape has a chance to clatter to the ground somewhere distant, and he staggers away from Tim in the opposite direction, bent almost double against a fresh and sudden agony that's less like a building wave and more like ramming into a brick wall. It carries the memory of a flickering flame and old leather crackling in his hand, but this is so much more than that; forget trying to stubbornly hold back the quiet cries of pain, he'd be screaming if he could only just _breathe_.

____

He has to watch (he has to observe how all of this inflects Tim's experience). He has to know (he has to understand what it _feels_ like as Tim slips into death). He can't let Tim be lost. He does none of these things, collapsing far enough away that he can no longer hear anything but his own choked, desperate noises, and focuses on not moving not thinking not seeing not hearing not breathing until spots dance wildly in his vision.

____

When the pain vanishes all at once, Jon knows without turning around that Tim is dead.

____

He squeezes his eyes shut, shuddering, until one by one those pinpricks of sight across his skin begin to wink out, the crackle along his nerves fading to an occasional spark. His hands gingerly feel out the new ridges and bumps of scar tissue left behind—they twitch in places before finally going still—as around him, the ruins of the wax museum settle back into a familiar obscurity.

____

_I'm still me, Tim._

____

He can feel something lurking beneath his skin now, though, now that it's been invited in, and he doesn't know that he'll be able to contain it for long.

____

_I'm still me._

____


End file.
